Last night I had bit of a battle with my Linux server. The evening had already started out badly with a backup of this website failing due to some mysterious Sqlite error (note, that is was on a Windows machine). Next, backups from my laptop to the server failed, and I could suddenly no longer access network shares on the server by the server's name. So, I logged on to the server from my laptop, opened the Samba config file, and added an entry, specifying its netbios name, and then restarted Samba. At this point, the server was visible in the "network neighbourhood" again, and the backups could proceed. Little did I know that this was only the first problem that I was going to be dealing with that evening.

I've been trying out different advertisers on this website, WidgetBucks being one of them. The hope is that, one day, this website will cover its own hosting costs. As of yesterday, WidgetBucks is no longer active on this website. This was done because WidgetBucks popped up a message saying that they were going to disable the account in three days because it was failing to meet "minimum requirements," as outlined in the terms and conditions. I checked the terms and conditions, and there was nothing there that I had failed to meet; they didn't even have minimum revenue requirements. Rather than try to fight the decision, I decided to pull all of their advertisements off this site for the following reasons:

If you have a digital photo frame from AVLabs (or some other company) and it simply shows "initializing" when you insert an SD card, and switch it on, try a smaller card. I came across this problem recently when my sister bought a digital photo frame, and a 4 GB SD card. Unbeknownst to both of us, a 4 GB SD card, is in fact a 4 GB SDHC (High Capacity) card, and the SDHC standard is incompatible with the SD card that it is based upon.Yes, that's right, despite having SD written on the front (with HC in a different font), and having the same physical size as the original SD card standard, only SDHC card readers can access the data on 4 GB to 32 GB SDHC cards.

I have always had my reservations about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) due to issues such as reliability and control over my own data. To date, no SaaS vendor has addressed my concerns, indeed some people have been openly agressive, to the point of suggesting that I'm so paranoid that I need my head checked. Well, last night I had a problem that highlighted my reliability concerns: the power supply to my home router broke, leaving me without internet until I could buy a replacement today. Due to Dick Smith electronics becoming increasingly poor in its electronics selection (it is now hopeless for the electronics enthusiast), I had to drive all the way into the other side of downtown wellington to Jaycar, in order to buy a 5VDC 3A power supply. One small failure knocked out my internet connectivity for half a day.